The After Hours

This episode was a good setup for the season finale. I wish it had been a little more revealing in some parts, but I feel like it showed us enough to build hype for the season finale. However, despite saving the excitement for the end, it still left us with a high level of anticipation and curiosity for next week.

Some people may have been frustrated by the lack of answers to some questions, but all nine episodes have been a build-up to the finale, which I honestly have high expectations for, because I trust Ben Stiller and we'll have 76 extremely revealing minutes ahead of us. I give the episode a score of 8 because on the "Severance" scale of scores, 8 would be the usual high quality that the episodes present, which for me is already excellent, 9 would be only for "Woe's Hollow" and "Chikhai Bardo", two episodes completely out of the curve in this series, which were impactful from beginning to end, and 10 so far only for "The We We Are", which was the best episode of the series so far, perhaps not for a long time.

While I enjoyed last weeks episode I was a bit annoyed of a second standalone episode away from the characters we loved and waited 3 years for. This episode brings back everything that makes this show what it is in full force at its top level. The performance were great, the jokes were funny and -as always- left us with more questions than answers. Next weeks episode being over an hour long definitely gives a lot to look forward to. Also apparently people are saying the board is made up of a bunch of goats now? I'm here for it, this is definitely the best fanbase in the world. Yes I'm rambling but I needed to reach the minimum character requirement.

We finally return to catch up with our four friends in MDR, but this episode suffers from lack of major plot advancement for being so late in the season. The show has so little character development this season compared to last. We've gotten some background information, and that's fine, but I feel like the plot-driven aspect has slowed down compared to season one. If the show isn't plot-driven, and has mostly stopped being character-driven too, then what's left? The mystery? That's it? The mystery alone isn't enough to make a great show, but that's pretty much all the show has been for the majority of the last handful of episodes. It's getting frustrating.

If the penultimate episode of the season had this much tension I fear how intense the finale is going to be.

This episode did a great job at both paying things off and setting things up for the big finale similarly to S1's second to last episode.

Lot's of emotions this episode and I have to admit I almost teared up a few times; the way it tackles these themes of innocence and the continual ones of individuality are especially potent this episode.

Some brilliant performances this episode, this show better sweep the Emmys because it deserves to!

Overall fantastic episode, one of the best of the season, hoping next week reaches the heights of the first season's finale.

Of course, a great episode of setup is only as good as the following payoff. But this episode is superb, managing to set up a huge season finale while also progressing the plot and giving us exciting new plot points to push us forward.

The penultimate episode of season 1 had this uneasy and tense feeling, and that is dialed up to 11 here, especially with a consistently stressful score.

Milkshake finally seems to snap (Tramell Tillman is incredible), Adam Scott also gets a lot to chew on, and i think every characters plotpoint went in an extremely interesting direction. Cobel gets, ironically, more interesting things to do in this than in her own episode last week. Helly and Dylan have huge cliffhangers that i also can't wait to see resolved.

So ready for the season 2 finale. Not ready for the wait for season 3.